Risk and reward

Move forward
Once you decide which ideas to move forward with, then you have to act quickly.
“Move on that and make those bets quickly and cut through the process,” Nandy says. “Then, what happens is, you succeed or fail very quickly, right? Then you can build on that quickly. Otherwise, as the whole thing lingers, your success is delayed, and so is your failure, which is sucking in more money from your kitty to do that kind of thing.”
First, create ways to measure your progress so you know if you’re succeeding or failing.
“It is not that you discuss with your customer only at the end, at one point in time,” he says. “You have multiple checkpoints. We intend to go back. There are checkpoints for different things. You define, maybe depending on how long the project is, 10 proof points or five proof points — whatever you define.”
The key to creating proof points is that they should be done before you start working on the project and be there to help show you if you’re on track or not.
“Ask the people who are doing it themselves to say, ‘At what point of time do you think you have failed?’ because you have to ask those questions before the start of the project because once you start the project, you slowly grow and you’re not objective anymore,” he says. “You’re part of the problem, so defining at what point to pull the plug on a project is something that you do before with the team so people are a little more sane and less married to the idea so they can make objective calls at that point in time.”
Some of the proof points may be technology-related, while others may be financial, and some may be related to your customers.
“Whatever assumptions or insights you had before you started the project, are they still valid or has something else come in the meantime to change the market or has something happened where people’s ideas have changed or have some technology come about that makes the whole thing obsolete and changes the whole idea?” Nandy says. “So it’s important to define those proof points and have a set of people who are external who help you assess it.”
It’s also important, as you move forward, to knock down the barriers to success that may exist, which include approving budgets and resources as well as simplifying processes. For example, if getting an approval for a customer takes seven days, find a way to cut it back to three. If it takes 72 days to hire someone and get him or her on board, cut it back to 62. By looking to simplify processes for your people, it increases their creativity and moves everyone forward in growth mode.
“Bureaucracy busting should be a constant exercise because it’s a human thing,” Nandy says. “We build it up trying to allocate work in the right way, so constantly looking at that is a critical component for having a company that’s growing and growing in innovative ways and doing things for customers that customers just love.”
How to reach: Aricent Inc., (650) 391-1088 or www.aricent.com